


Carry me to the end

by girodelles_waifu



Category: Casablanca (1942)
Genre: M/M, Post-Canon, Secret Identities (sort of)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:56:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25505560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girodelles_waifu/pseuds/girodelles_waifu
Summary: After his escape from Casablanca, Victor tries to forget about Rick Blaine by focusing on his new resistance activities in Norway and obsessing over his mysterious supplier in Sweden. Neither strategy turns out to be very helpful.
Relationships: Rick Blaine/Victor Laszlo
Comments: 12
Kudos: 21
Collections: Rare Male Slash Exchange 2020





	Carry me to the end

**Author's Note:**

  * For [psychomachia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychomachia/gifts).



> I really enjoyed working with this pairing! I hope you enjoy!

“Well. This could have gone better.”

Victor starts to laugh, then winces as pain flares through the bullet wound in his leg; his scarf is tied around it roughly, but it’s still seeping blood. “I struggle, Mr. Blaine, to see how it could have gone worse.”

Rick shrugs, reaching down between them to fish in his trouser pocket for a cigarette. When none are forthcoming he pulls a blade of spring grass instead and bites down on it. “It could have been winter.”

Several minutes pass in silence.

“You can leave me and go to the rendezvous, you know,” Victor points out, after the stillness becomes unbearable. “I’m not going anywhere like this.”

Rick’s eyebrows raise. “And turn up without you? They’ll think I led you into a trap. Besides, I’m not letting you get yourself killed. Not after all the trouble I went to last time.”

Victor looks through a gap in the bushes, gazing down the hill towards the fjord. It’s pale dawn now, with mist swirling up over the pines. “I rather thought you were doing all that for...someone else.” He shivers a little—their hiding place, in a hollow under the roots of a fallen tree, is well concealed from view, but even in spring the Norwegian wind blows through pitilessly.

“Perhaps so.” Rick slips his leather jacket off slowly and drops it over Victor’s shoulders.

**SUPPLIES NEEDED FOR SORTIE IN THE SNOWY WASTES STOP TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE STOP HORYMIR**

**YOU KNOW THE PLACE STOP BE ON THE LOOKOUT STOP BRUGAL**

Victor had often wondered who it was he was corresponding with in Sweden; who was heading the gunrunning organization that supplied them. 

All together, he’d spent more time concentrating over the radio, waiting for that soft lifeline of Morse code, than talking with his own men. Obviously all he knew was the code name: Brugal had been referred to them by another contact who knew nothing more than that either.

Despite knowing nothing about him, Victor started to feel over the months of contact that he was beginning to get to know him rather well. He could tell it was the same man at the radio each night—he liked to think it was a man, in any case. The keytouch was the same, and he was as witty as one possibly could be through code phrases over Morse code.

Victor knew he was going to die at this, one day. He tried not to think about it too much, but the knowledge was always there. He wondered what Brugal would think when he failed to respond. Most likely he would pragmatically send out feelers for a new contact, and set up deliveries to another man with another radio, and another line of morse code through the dark.

But Victor liked to imagine he still might think about Horymir once or twice. 

**HOW MANY BLACKBIRDS IN YOUR PIE STOP BRUGAL**

**PLANNED FOR A DOZEN BUT SHORT ONE STOP HORYMIR**

“I don't…” Victor winces again, gritting his teeth as he tries without success to shift into a more comfortable position in the cramped space. “I don’t see why you came. You were in Sweden. You were safe.”

Rick doesn’t look at him as he pulls off his scarf. “Now that I think of it, you certainly looked safe, the last time I saw you.” He hands Victor the folded scarf, still without looking. It feels both deeply intimate, the way they’re pressed together in the hollow of the fallen tree, and like they’re worlds apart. “How did you end up back in occupied territory?”

Victor shrugs under Rick’s jacket as he tucks the scarf beneath his leg. It would have been easy enough to explain to anyone else, but he struggled to think of a way to explain it to Rick that didn’t make it sound like he was casually throwing away the life he’d saved in Casablanca. “It just didn’t feel right.”

He didn’t know what to make of Rick Blaine, the first time he saw him in Casablanca. He seemed to be the sort of profiteer Victor had seen many of in Europe (and assassinated almost as many, when they got in the way of things); the kind of man who might look trustworthy at a glance but who would look the other way at anything or betray anyone who might threaten his income. And obviously Victor was doing a lot of that.

Thus it was the biggest shock of his life when he found himself on a plane out of Morocco with Ilsa, and owing his escape to Rick Blaine.

Or at least, he thought it was the biggest shock of his life at the time.

**NO THIEVES OF MERCY TONIGHT QUESTION HORYMIR**

**TRYING AGAIN TOMORROW IF WEATHER ALLOWS STOP BRUGAL**

Victor stood frozen on the beach, the cold air stinging his lungs as he gasped. “You?”

Rick Blaine stepped out of the boat, looking as always infuriatingly composed. “Oh. Horymir. I might have guessed.”

It was definitely him, despite the difference in clothes: he wore a leather jacket instead of the tailored suits from the casino, and a pair of goggles wet with sea spray was around his neck. 

But it felt wrong looking at him in the cold like this. All Victor’s memories of seeing Rick Blaine were in the Morocco sun, through that constant hot shine in the air. He didn’t belong in the chilly clarity of Norway. Nor did Victor, in point of fact, but with the world like this nobody was quite where they belonged.

“You know him?” said one of the men. Rick raised his hands a little as several guns were pointed in his direction, looking up slightly to meet Victor’s eyes calmly.

“Y...no...well. That’s rather difficult to answer.” Victor had met Rick Blaine. Knowing him was another matter—he suspected few ever had. “This is...let’s keep it to code names for now. Brugal was my contact in Sweden for the last several months.”

“So you trust him.”

This remained to be seen, but Victor couldn’t think of any pressing reasons to have Rick—Brugal—shot dead on the beach. Someone might hear the gunfire. And cleaning it up would take time they didn’t have. “Sure.”

Victor cornered Rick in the radio room as soon as they arrived back at their underground hideout and stowed away the munitions from the boat. If he was going to have it out with his ex-lover’s ex-lover, he didn’t want to do it in front of his men. “What kind of game is this?” he demanded, cutting off Rick’s attempt to speak.

Rick’s eyes narrowed a little. “Why does it have to be a game?”

“What else would you call it?”

“Look, I didn’t know I was going to run into you any more than you did,” Rick said. “I just wanted to help.”

Victor realised he was certainly handling things very badly, but discovering that he had been trying to distract himself from someone he couldn’t stop thinking of by obsessing over the same person under a different name was a hard thing to handle well. Had the room ever felt so small before? 

Gradually his practicality as a resistance fighter started to win out. “I...I do happen to be short a man,” he said. 

“You told me that already,” Rick points out.

“Right...I hope you’re ready to be shot at.”

“There’s been entirely too little lead in my diet recently.”

Three days later, the assault came off almost perfectly. Almost.

Explosives on tripwires (some of the munitions Rick brought them from Sweden) halted the convoy of trucks in a narrow section of mountain road, hemmed in on both sides by thickly wooded inclines. The convoy had only been lightly guarded, and a hail of gunfire from the woods soon met no answering shots.

Victor had to admit he wasn’t sorry to have Rick along, even if the main reason he was accompanying them was because none of the men trusted him quite enough to leave him at their encampment unguarded. He was a good shot, and it had been a long time since Victor had been in the field with someone he really knew...even if it was Brugal he actually knew, and not Rick. Victor could almost be honestly happy he was there, if it wasn’t for his remaining suspicions as to why Rick had turned up so suddenly, and what he was really there for.

Most of the members of the assault team scattered into the woods immediately, with a few remaining to descend on the convoy and grab anything lightweight they could use before laying more explosives to render the remainder useless when the destroyed convoy was discovered. The Nazis would get nothing but a pile of scrap metal rather than the delicate scientific equipment they had stolen to deliver to their own weapons laboratories.

Victor had just finished filling a pack with rations and spare ammunition when Rick shouted something from behind him. Victor turned to see him raising his gun, then staggered as he felt two shots tear white-hot through his leg. From behind, he realized a little belatedly as Rick fired back, killing the Nazi guard who had been playing dead, and ran into the road to half-drag him into the woods.

It was soon clear that Victor wouldn’t be up to walking for quite some time, and while Rick was a strong man, he wasn’t going to be able to drag a man of Victor’s size all the way to the rendezvous point in the dark. Thus an awkward half-hour later they ended up huddled together underneath the roots of a fallen tree waiting for Victor to recover enough to make it the rest of the way.

**THIS COULD BE OUR LAST CONTACT STOP HORYMIR**

**DONT LETS BE TOO OPTIMISTIC STOP SIGNING OFF STOP BRUGAL**

“Horymir. It suits you.”

“You know what it means?” Victor turns to look at Rick, surprised.

“I found it in an encyclopedia a few weeks after you first made contact. A mythical Czech hero—of course you would pick something like that.” He chuckles a little, making a series of small frosted clouds.

Victor thinks he ought to feel mocked, having Rick Blaine laughing at his idealism, but he doesn’t. The laughter had sounded...affectionate, more than anything else.

Clearly the image of Brugal he constructed in his mind over the past few months is getting in the way of his perception of reality.

“And what about Brugal, then?” Victor debates trying to sound indignant, but it comes out as honest curiosity.

Rick turns to look at him then, leaning his weight on one arm, and Victor realizes once again how close they really are as he finds himself looking up at Rick’s eyes from only a couple handbreadths away.

“You’ll find I’m tragically unimaginative and criminally lacking in ideals,” Rick says. It’s not yet quite light enough to tell exactly what color his eyes are, but Victor stares anyway.

“Criminally lacking indeed, after you almost got shot saving me.”

“Maybe I was just trying to keep him from shooting me, did you think of that?”

Victor has—and he heard a third shot, before Rick fired back. But if Rick was really only thinking of his own safety, coming towards the open road was a funny way of showing it. Was the long rent in the leather jacket’s sleeve there when Rick first arrived on the beach? Victor can’t remember.

“Setting aside your stubborn insistence on your lack of a better nature,” Victor says, “Brugal?”

Rick shrugs with another soft laugh. “It’s a brand of rum. I’m not imaginative.”

The hand Rick is bracing himself on suddenly slips a little in the damp earth, bringing their faces even closer together. Victor starts as their lips brush.

“Was that an accident?” he asks, not wanting to get the wrong idea about things.

“Do you want it to be?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well then.”

Rick doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, so Victor tries kissing him properly this time, enjoying the lingering sensation as his lips slowly warm enough to feel everything.

Several seconds later Victor pulls away with a sigh. “But why did you come?”

“Not letting that go, are you.”

“I can be just as stubbornly insistent as you, if I need to.”

Rick turns away, resting his arms on his knees and clasping his hands. “Maybe I wanted to see who I was talking to on the radio before he went and got himself killed,” he says quietly.

Victor shifts enough to lean against his shoulder. “And what did you think of your blind date?”

Rick turns, breaking into a brief but genuine and unguarded smile. “It’s the kind of surprise I can live with, I think.” He gets to his feet, brushing dirt off his trousers. “Are you any more up to walking now? If you want to make the rendezvous we should start before it gets too light.”

Victor takes the hand Rick holds out and pulls himself slowly to his feet, wincing as he tests how much weight he can put on the injured leg. “I was just thinking I could do with a romantic stroll right about now,” he says. Rick starts to put his arm around his waist to support him, but Victor pulls him closer, leaning down to kiss him again.

“You ought to have been a travel agent,” Rick laughs as Victor lets him go.

“It won’t be at all safe,” Victor says suddenly.

Rick looks up at him with raised eyebrows.

“If you stay,” Victor clarifies.

Rick shrugs. “We all have to go sometime, don’t we?” His tone is light, but his grip tightens on Victor’s waist under the leather jacket. “Now, how about that romantic tour of the fjords…”


End file.
